Sarah Charlesworth's series "Objects of Desire"(1983-86) takes reality as something bracketed by quotation marks: a fiction, according to postmodernist critic Craig Owens, produced and sustained by itsrepresentation as image.

Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges imagined language as an endless metaphor. At the heart of language, he surmised, was an attempt to collapse two incommensurable orders, the experiential and the symbolic, the alignments of which could only be...

On Oct. 5, 2007, in an Alameda County, Calif., courthouse, Kristin Sue Lucas became Kristin Sue Lucas. The redundancy of this "name change" was precisely the point, reflecting the artist's desire to reload her identity as one would a webpage,...

Images associated with listening-cups pressed to the wall, a makeshift antenna, earplugs cast in metal-thread through the work of London-based, Argentinian-born artist Amalia Pica. It's an unusual preoccupation, particularly for an artist whose...

The New Museum's survey, "NYC 1993," furnished the discussion's broader frame. Curated by Gioni and three of his colleagues, the show distills one particularly decisive (and divisive) year in the New York art world. Its fulcrum was the Whitney...

The Annual's seventh edition, up through late February, is the effort of Richard Birkett, a transplant to New York from London and the curator at Artists Space. As in previous iterations, the installation is dense and deliberately open-ended....

Conceptual artist, political activist and cultural theorist Martha Rosler held her first garage sale in 1973 in the art gallery of the University of California at San Diego, where she was then a graduate student. Publicizing the event in local...

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev was quick to dispel notions of a "return to painting," as in the 1980s vogue for neo-geo and expressionist styles. Speaking for her fellow jurors, she criticized the unnaturalness of awarding prizes to artists and...

For her first show at Murray Guy in New York, Zoe Leonard turned half the gallery into a camera obscura in order to consider photography anew. The fourth installation in an ongoing series, Leonard's lens, 453 West 17th Street (2012), cast an...